


The twilight of her memory doth stay

by middlemarch



Category: Wonder Woman (2017)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Gift Giving, Grief/Mourning, Male-Female Friendship, Romance, Vignette
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-21
Updated: 2017-06-21
Packaged: 2018-11-16 18:42:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 527
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11258709
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/middlemarch/pseuds/middlemarch
Summary: It did not need to be emblazoned with his crest for her to know the origin of the case.





	The twilight of her memory doth stay

Bruce did not remind her of Steve. He wanted to, she’d known that since she had spoken of Steve once, glancingly, recounting some aspect of the first War that she hadn’t thought of in years but which had the same perfect clarity of her every other memory, though none of the lucent vitality that lit her memories of Steve. She hadn’t known that men did not recall the past the way she did, not until she talked over the years to Etta and Sammy, to Lois and Alfred and Athene, and heard how details fell away or altered, how perspective was lost, one bar of music defining the refrain, one petal the flower, how the scent of lilac could mean spring and beloved and an aching melancholy. It was not so for her; her past was never more than a moment away, her mind having recorded everything, anything, even as she had paid attention to what was most important—a baby’s cry, Chief’s stillness, Steve’s voice saying goodbye, older than she had ever been, would ever be.

Bruce with his darkness that he carried with him like a treasure, Bruce with his tinkerer’s shed and his cleverness that could not help but seek praise, his ability, his tendency to become lost, his need to be found—none of it was like Steve, who had been a candle unwavering, laughter, wry and tender, breaking the night, waking her before dawn, a hand outstretched to dance, to hold a shield aloft so she might launch herself into battle while he waited, grasping the instrument steadily towards destruction because he saw the world truly and how he fit in it. Bruce brooded and his grief lapped round him; Steve was still the companion of her soul and she only loved him more for all the years he had been away, all the places he had called her to, where she was needed. Bruce sent her the glass negative in a velvet lined box, to show her that he knew her. He made a gift of herself to her. Steve had given her his watch, time for an immortal, something entirely, wonderfully other than herself that she could not have had otherwise, he’d given her his death without making himself a hero, so she could understand the world she meant to nurture, how hard, how easy it was to love. 

Bruce did not remind her of Steve. Yet, to see her lover’s face next to hers, sepia and golden, Chief’s eyes still dark, comrades-in-arms and their arms so close but not around each other as they might have stood in an RAF training camp or Korea, made her love her friend for the gift, the one he gave and the one he did not know he had offered. 

“Once you thought a treatise explained love,” Steve said in her ear. She felt his hand at her waist, firm against the cashmere sweater, reminding her. She saw them on the boat, in the square in the snow, and knew who Bruce reminded her of, the Amazon who had abandoned her home, before she had become a goddess, before she was a woman.

**Author's Note:**

> An expansion of the gift Bruce gives, after some musings about his actions on Tumblr. The title is from John Donne's "An Anatomy of the World."


End file.
